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The contribution of rice breeding for ensuring food security in India is well known. Organized rice breeding is nearly eight decades old in the country which started with the establishment of Central Rice Research Institute at Cuttack in the year 1946. Thereafter, the rice breeding programmes have undergone several transformations to meet the needs of stakeholders at both regional and national level. For all the rice ecologies of the country, high yielding varieties were developed by deployment of the required genes. Initially the objectives were met only through phenotypic selections based on breeders' own skills. With time, the rice breeders of the country adopted the advances in the fields of science and technologies especially in the areas of plant sciences. From the initial phase of users of methodologies and materials developed elsewhere, the rice scientists of India have transformed themselves to discover useful genes from the vast germplasm resources of the country and utilize them as per the local requirements through marker assisted selection. Despite the progress made in last few decades, the genetic gain from breeding programmes is becoming stagnant over time and the increased yield in current years are now attributed more to production interventions. The rice breeders of India need to take advantage of the recent developments of speed breeding, whole genome sequences of various Oryza species, advanced phenomics and computational methods, high throughput genotyping platforms, tissue culture and genome editing tools etc. to shift from its current approach of "breeding by chance" to "breeding by design" and to bring significant improvements in the rate of genetic gain per generation.

With the fast increase of human population and reduction in land areas under cultivation, it is essential to breed rice varieties with higher yield potential and tolerance to multiple stresses using modern breeding technologies. Till date, a large number of rice varieties and rice hybrids have been developed in India for different ecologies. However, average rice production in India is 2600 kg/hectare. Since rice is the staple food in India and grown in ~43.86 million hectare, the present production and productivity are not sufficient enough to feed the increasing population. Therefore, it is required to develop high yielding rice varieties to feed the growing population. However, HYVs are usually amenable to various biotic and abiotic stresses for which there is a great yield loss. Besides, there is no significant increase in yield though a number of high yielding rice varieties have been developed through conventional breeding. Thus, higher genetic gain in rice is required to combat the existing situation which is only possible through advanced breeding approaches such as genomic selection, forward breeding, haplotype-based precision breeding along with genomic tools such as Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS) technology. This review addresses the current progress made in advanced genomic-assisted breeding and need of modern breeding technologies for rice improvement.

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Rice (Oryza sativa) is an important cereal crop and staple food for more than half of the world population. The sedentary endoparasitic nematode Meloidogyne graminicola is one of the major biotic stress factors that limit rice production globally irrespective of the agro-ecosystem. To tackle this, the host plant resistance is given prime importance due to global awareness towards ecologically stable and environmentally safe management options. However, the availability of resistant source within O. sativa against M. graminicola is limited and hence the search was extended to its wild relatives globally. In line with that, about 24 germplasms of different Oryza species collected from the gene bank of NRRI, Cuttack were evaluated against M. graminicola under artificial inoculation condition. Among them O. eichingeri and O. grandiglumis belonging to O. officinalis species complex and O. brachyantha were found to be resistant to M. graminicola with the lowest gall index (2.0-2.3 galls /root system). Oyza rufipogon, O. officinalis and O. alta were found tolerant to the nematode while all other species exhibited susceptible to highly susceptible reaction to the nematode. A more comprehensive study is necessary to shed light on the consistency of resistance within each Oryza species and also suggest the utilization of molecular tools to decipher the resistance mechanism govern in the reported accessions against rice root-knot nematode.